Explain the difference in semantics between the two because the mechanics sound the same, best I can tell this company was just running ads like everyone else. Creating psychological profiles of voters to craft messages to them to pursuade their vote I believe is the same thing as political advertising and is exactly what Obama's campaign were doing and had countless fawning articles written about them (just Google it.) Best I can tell the real facet here being used to paint this in a new light is the use of harvested data in a way that violated Facebook ToS but that is 100% nothing new and crawling FB via the API to do data science was a new idea like 10+ years ago (and it has since been locked down due to the prevalence of abuse I'd assume.)

Why is this hard to understand? The same technology can be used for both good and bad.

Obama used it to inform people about his polcies and get the out to vote. Trump used it to spread lies, falsehoods and half-truths. Essentially any media that was outlandish enough to become viral was promoted and promoted to hapless people who probably might have wondered why they were seeing so many distressing articles about America in "Carnage" (as Trump puts it).

Yep. So Obama is just "good" and Trump is just "bad". Way to view things boy.

At most this is your own political standards. Not anything that can be neutral and objective. Claiming one set of political ideas to be "right" is very dangerous.

So you are stating that the reverse interpretation where Obama spread lies and falsehoods, and smears his opponents while Trump was merely informing the public of truths is objectively just as valid as the opposite?

Just because something is political and not neutral does not mean that there are no facts associated with it. We may disagree on them, debate them, but to take the stance that there are none at all is the kind of tactic used by people who do not wish to debate the actual validity of their viewpoints.

Is it your view that all politicians roughly speak the same amount of lies vs. truth? That Trump's message is the same as Obama's message which is the same as any other political message?

That is Baizuo logic..

It comes down to motivation. Obama is a career politician, but Bannon is an ideologist. The former seeks to get elected, the latter seeks to plant ideas and change the society in a fundamental way. To me, Bannon is much more dangerous than Obama, because he is subversive.

Technically, there might be little difference, but Bannon clearly excels at using this tool to a greater effect, and the result is far more impactful and outreaching, even revolutionary. Guaranteed, other groups will take notice and trying to replicate their success, to feed their version of personalized agenda to your month.

The biggest difference is Bannon wants to break society to that it can be remade as he wants. Classic villain methodology, where the ends justify the means. Creating and exploiting divisions in society, damaging democratic institutions, so that the Government collapses and Democracy along with it. To be replaced with 'his' vision for this country. That is evil and treasonous.

And Obama did broken the society. Probably it's broken so badly, that it cannot be mended anymore...

I agree with your discomfort on Bannon's agenda, but aren't you conceptually backwards here? If Bannon is evil not because of his agenda but because he wants to bring societal change, isn't the same true for Abraham Lincoln?

Change via Destruction is much different than change via Cohesion.

And now we have the Chaotic President, thanks, Bannon.

> This doesn't sound like advertising to me, this is manipulation and brainwashing.

If advertising isn't manipulating and brainwashing, what is it? As far as I can tell, advertising is precisely that.

that is what they claim they are able to do. the reality is likely quite different.